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FILM; Handling Stars Who Respond to Affection

CHRISTOPHER GUEST will tell you that his new movie is not about dogs. His mock documentary ''Best in Show,'' which opens on Friday, is set at a Westminster-like national dog competition in Philadelphia, and its characters do include Winky the Norwich terrier, Miss Agnes the Shih Tzu and Beatrice the Weimaraner. But, Mr. Guest says, the story is about the owners, not the animals, and he could have found the same humor making a film about hospital workers or art dealers.

Mr. Guest himself is a man of many faces. He was Nigel Tufnel, the longhaired, washed-up lead guitarist, in Rob Reiner's ''This Is Spinal Tap'' (1984) and Corky St. Clair, the frisky Middle American amateur theater director, in his own ''Waiting for Guffman'' (1997). In ''Best in Show,'' he's the down-home Harlan Pepper, a bloodhound owner from Pine Nut, N.C., with visions of dog show glory. Sitting in the hunter green and polished wood bar of the Mark Hotel in Manhattan, he's a polite 52-year-old with short gray hair and a voice that is, at least in an interview with a New York reporter, American.

He is, however, also the Fifth Baron Haden-Guest of Saling in the County of Essex, and London newspapers refer to his second-generation-Hollywood wife of 16 years, Jamie Lee Curtis, as Lady Hayden-Guest. Mr. Guest was actually born in New York, but his diplomat father whisked him away six months later, and a lifetime of moving back and forth has left him with ''a slightly schizophrenic feeling when I'm in London.'': Well, he is sitting in New York, drinking English Breakfast tea. White.

The new movie is distinctly North American, as is most of the cast. That includes the usual suspects like Catherine O'Hara and Eugene Levy as Cookie and Gerry Fleck, Winky's proud owners, who compose and sing little ditties about their pet. (Mr. Levy wrote the lyrics, one of which rhymes merrier, derriere and terrier.) Michael McKean plays Stefan Vanderhoof, half of a gay New York couple who own Miss Agnes and her lookalike sister. And Parker Posey is Meg Swan, half of a tightly wound yuppie couple who take Beatrice (who is every bit as elegant as William Wegman's models) to their psychotherapist because the dog saw the couple having sex. Fred Willard, whom Mr. Guest met in 1969 when they appeared together in ''Little Murders'' at Circle in the Square, plays a dog show announcer whose commentary constantly horrifies his British co-announcer, played by Jim Piddock. That's what the show's organizers get for teaming two guys named Buck and Trevor.

Mr. Levy, who wrote the film's script with Mr. Guest, says these characters aren't really exaggerated. ''Everybody in our movie we met on the dog show trail,'' he says. That includes, he swears, the Anna Nicole Smith type (Jennifer Coolidge), married to a painfully frail man named Cabot (Patrick Cranshaw), who appears to be 110 years old or so; and the Anne Heche lookalike (Jane Lynch) who is the handler for Rhapsody in White, the Cabots' standard poodle. When the two women's warm relationship is accidentally revealed during the broadcast of the Mayflower Dog Show, Mr. Willard as the announcer cries out, ''Rhapsody has two mommys!''

Rhapsody, Winky, Miss Agnes, Beatrice, Hubert the bloodhound and the other 150 or so dog characters who appear in the film are all played by professionals. That is, they are dog show champions, not actor dogs.

So the animals didn't need rehearsals for the show sequence, but the human actors did. ''The dogs all did very well,'' says Earlene Luke, the retired Washington State handler who condensed her usual eight-week course to five hours for Mr. Guest's unofficial canine repertory company. ''They're good listeners and good mimics. But there is a lot to it; it's not something that you just learn overnight.'' It didn't hurt that a few professional owner-handlers appeared in the show scenes as well (look for the people with the pointer, the Siberian husky and the Shetland sheepdog).

And these animals deserve praise. After all, many of them spend a good deal of their time traveling in crates in the luggage holds of airplanes, being groomed within an inch of their lives and missing out on some natural doggie pleasures. Mr. Levy remembers the first time he met one of the show dogs being considered for the film. ''I took him over to a parking lot, and he started hopping like a grasshopper and rolling over and over,'' says Mr. Levy, whose family dog back in Toronto is a 7-year-old Labrador-beagle mix named Lucy. ''The owner came over and said, 'First time on grass.' '' The dog was 11 months old and lived in California.

Mr. Guest might have been equally horrified. He, Ms. Curtis and their two children (ages 13 and 4) have two 8-year-old dogs, Henry, a Labrador-golden retriever mix, and Lucy (popular name), who is half Akita and ''then the rest of it is a mystery.'' Both live outdoor lives at home in California and travel only by car, when the family is packing up for the two-day drive to their place in the mountains.

I drive them personally, in the back of our truck, and my wife flies with the children and meets me there,'' says Mr. Guest. ''We've found a motel midway that allows dogs, and they're fantastic travelers.'' And when they arrive, he adds, ''it's true heaven.

''We have a river on our property, and they get to run in these fields and chase birds and jump in the river.''

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At no time, Mr. Guest contends, does he speak for his dog in funny little voices (as his character Harlan does for Hubert, in a sort of sweet Mortimer Snerd voice, pretending to brag, ''Hey, judge, I'm the best one here'') or put clothes on them (''These are huge dogs; it would be embarrassing''). Nor does he refer to Henry and Lucy as ''the kids.'' (Which is how this film idea got started. Six years ago he overheard dog owners at a California park doing just that.) But like most pet owners, he does seem to turn a little soft when talking about them.

He does an impressive imitation of Lucy's ''amazing wolf howl,'' which she makes every time they drive up to the house. He explains what very different creatures the two animals are.

''Henry is a retriever, so his entire life is chasing a tennis ball,'' says Mr. Guest. ''And Lucy will watch with disdain at this futile hobby, basically. And it is amazing. Obviously it's tempting always to anthropomorphize, but Lucy will look at Henry as if 'How can you be so stupid? Why would you waste your energy.' She sits there with her paws crossed, to make him feel even worse.''

The dogs in ''Best in Show'' definitely come off better than the humans. You don't see dogs becoming hysterical and verbally abusive over the loss of a bumblebee-shaped toy. Or packing eight kimonos for a 48-hour stay in Philadelphia. Or singing ''Barbara Allen'' over the telephone to their owners. But as silly as these human behaviors may be, Mr. Guest says he is not ridiculing the characters.

''I don't make movies that make fun of anything,'' he says. ''I think if you like the people, that's the important thing. Because if you don't like these people, if they were just to be a one-dimensional parody, then you have no investment emotionally in the end when you're waiting to hear who wins.''

He couldn't have played Nigel of Spinal Tap, he says, if he didn't really love music. And although ''Red, White and Blaine,'' the sesquicentennial tribute to Blaine, Mo., in ''Waiting for Guffman,'' is a truly terrible show, it still has a little of theater's magic, the power to transport.

So Mr. Guest certainly doesn't think dog owners or dog-show-circuit regulars are any more mentally off-balance than the rest of us. He's quite sure, for instance, that his passion for retiring to a special place in the house, putting on magnifying glasses and tying fishing flies -- ''would be incredibly strange to a lot of people.''

''Why would you sit at this table and take deer hair and muskrat fur and wind it onto a hook?'' he says. ''What could you be thinking?'' But that doesn't mean that some examples of contemporary urban pet-owner behavior won't cause him to raise an eyebrow. Someone mentions a high-strung Chelsea dachshund named Patti who is on either Zoloft or Tofranil for chronic separation anxiety and the $300-a-session dog psychologist who prescribed it.

''Well,'' says Mr. Guest, ''that's another movie.''

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A version of this article appears in print on September 24, 2000, on Page 2002013 of the National edition with the headline: FILM; Handling Stars Who Respond to Affection. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe